‘Brando’s Smile,’ by Susan L. Mizruchi

The title of Susan L. Mizruchi’s Marlon Brando book is a hassle. You don’t want to be seen with anything called “Brando’s Smile.” You just don’t. I read the book the old-fashioned way — on paper. I read it in restaurants, on the subway and in the park. I read it with the front cover obscured. To dislike the title of the book is to reject its putative premise — that Brando wasn’t just a sexy slob with no technique but an extremely skilled, deeply intelligent, fiercely perceptive “public citizen” who “carefully controlled his smiles.” Mizruchi seems to be making a case that the modus operandi of one of the movies’ greatest performers can be reduced to the strategic concealment of dental work.

But as it happens, “Brando’s Smile” isn’t about Brando’s mouth at all. After the introduction, we don’t hear much about it until the final pages. This business of his smile is just a pretext for the vast amount of research Mizruchi has done in Brando’s archives, and the result is a heavily footnoted chronological assembly of observations, analysis, plot summary, photographs and trivia, written, it must be said, in the manner of a grant proposal. It’s uneven and full of speculative dot ­connecting.

What Mizruchi has unearthed “explains,” “implies,” “suggests,” “proves” and “confirms” all that one could ever want to know about her subject. One stated goal is to dispel eight “myths” about Brando: that greed and ambition made him renounce the theater at the start of the 1950s; that he was ignorant and undereducated; that after 1960 he made movies just for the money; that his resentment of his own fame made him fat; that he was anti-Semitic; that he was a glutton; that he was a political dilettante; and that, at the time of his death in 2004, he was broke and miserable.

Mizruchi’s tactic is, in part, to let Brando defend himself. She offers evidence of his reading list in order to present him as passionately curious, informed and less dour than he seemed to be: “Brando’s books and scripts reveal the powerful sense of humor that seemed so at odds with the gloomy characters he played.” She glosses over the fact that he was an atrocious speller to focus on his fascination with history, wildlife, ecology and the writings of Hannah Arendt. The goal of the book — another one — is to “provide insight into the life and mind of an American actor who continues to mesmerize and inspire us for reasons we can now more fully understand.”

You’re asked to reconsider the idea of actor as auteur. According to Mizruchi, Brando made the movies he appeared in better, therefore the films belonged to him. He was a star who insisted on reworking material. This doesn’t make him unique, but access to Brando’s intimate thoughts appears to have gone to Mizruchi’s head. She’s written academic books on the complexities of race, including “Becoming Multicultural: Culture, Economy, and the Novel, 1860-1920.” In this new book, however, she’s an enthusiast first and a critical scholar on matters of race, gender and social politics a very distant second, skipping opportunities to unpack Brando’s performances as nonwhite characters in “Viva Zapata!” (1952) and “The Teahouse of the August Moon” (1956). It’s not that those parts are indefensible; it’s that we’d expect a scholar with Mizruchi’s background to enjoy taking a crack at an interpretation. The same goes for the feminist response to “Last Tango in Paris” (1972), which she dismisses in a sentence.

But Mizruchi isn’t interested in analysis. Instead, she provides adulatory close readings of most of Brando’s 40 movies, to explain what each role reveals about Brando the literate, sentient, moral being. She insists that “his extensive reading continued to inform his work and led him to use the Pitcairn Island sequence in ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ as an opportunity to explore human behavior in Utopia, and to qualify the moral absolutism in his western ‘One-Eyed Jacks’ by portraying all the characters as corruptible.”

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“Brando’s Smile” isn’t a work of historical arts criticism or enriched profiling. It’s “Notes From the Stacks.” It doesn’t make a cogent case for much. Even those eight myths Mizruchi intends to debunk feel exactly like myths, since she makes no attempt to present them as credible problems. And so, most of the book reads like one of those newspaper corrections that refuse to tell you what the original error was, and much of the myth-busting feels like an opportunity for hero-worship.

Still, you do leave the book with a better understanding of Brando. It’s Mizruchi who remains confounding. For long stretches, she gives you sentences that need a hot comb. Her section on Brando’s only outing as a director, “One-Eyed Jacks” (1961), is gnarlier than the film. “That is the effect of Brando’s artistry,” she writes. “He depicts life through a most brutal realism but reveals it in a larger context, the vastness and mystery of nature.” Apparently, another effect of Brando’s artistry is knock-kneed writing.

Nonetheless, this is a major-ish book. It includes unseen, little-known details about Brando’s work habits, philosophies, sociopolitical causes, states of mind. He shared intense friendships with James Baldwin and Quincy Jones, with whom he discussed race and racial equality. And he and Michael Jackson sat down for a long recorded conversation. Brando was helping make Jackson a better actor. It’s a friendship that makes sense — they had their galactic, fun-house mirror fame in common.

Brando tinkered with the scripts for most of the films he acted in. You find discussions of some of that tinkering in other biographies. But this book departs from sweeping critical assessments, namely Richard Schickel’s disillusioned “Brando: A Life in Our Times,” from 1991. Mizruchi juxtaposes portions of the original scripts against Brando’s alterations, and what emerges over the course of the book — by, say, the late 1960s with Gillo Pontecorvo’s film “Burn!” — is a confident star who’d become an increasingly wise artist.

He’s reported to have rewritten Don Vito Corleone’s monologues in Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo’s screenplay for “The Godfather.” Mizruchi reproduces an early version of Corleone’s speech to the undertaker, then the speech Brando delivers in the film. She notes that his version is more eloquent, and she’s right. But you almost don’t need a guide for this material, certainly not one as besotted as Mizruchi appears to be. There’s also a long passage on “The Ugly American” (1963) in which Brando sums up the value of his character’s wife. She “plays the dramaturgical butler who brings the calling card of plot from the front door to the bedroom.” I’d buy three books of him just doing that.

BRANDO’S SMILE

His Life, Thought, and Work

By Susan L. Mizruchi

Illustrated. 469 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95.

Wesley Morris is a staff critic at Grantland.

A version of this review appears in print on July 27, 2014, on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Marlon’s Method. Today's Paper|Subscribe